I like how we're all awestruck about how our newer members are around the same age we were when we started coming here.
...who the hell is "we"?
I'm old enough to vote
I've never watched G.I. Joe
Yeah, one of the first times I felt old was when one of my brother's friends didn't know what He-Man was.
Pokemon was originally going to end cool in the anime and then they went ahead and cashed in instead of being decent about it :(
You know, while we're on the subject of GI Joe and He-Man...Pokemon was never anything but a cash-in either.
I mean, not to say a half-hour commercial CAN'T actually produce a satisfying story, but...when it does happen, it's really more of a pleasant surprise than something that you should expect.
(Caveat: I'm using "expect" to mean "think it's likely", not "think it's reasonable". Because of course it absolutely IS reasonable for people not to write things that suck. It's just not likely.)
I've mentioned The K-Metal from Krypton before as a sort of prototypical story that led to this kind of shit -- it was a 1940 Superman story that would have totally shaken up the status quo; Superman revealed his identity to Lois, she got superpowers, and they teamed up to fight crime together. (And yeah, by the '50's this sort of thing happened all the time, but there was always a reset button at the end of those stories -- THIS one didn't reset it at the end, those were intended to be permanent changes.)
And, as in the Pokemon case, the owners of the property told the creative team, no, we've got something here that we're making a shit-ton of money on, and we're not going to let you change it up like that.
And that's pretty much how superhero comics have run ever since -- characters don't grow or change. And now, 70 years later, the publishers are still trying to placate a shrinking core of customers who freak the hell out when Wonder Woman gets a new costume.